this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
77 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40220 readers
962 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hey there!

I'm thinking about starting a blog about privacy guides, security, self-hosting, and other shenanigans, just for my own pleasure. I have my own server running Unraid and have been looking at self-hosting Ghost as the blog platform. However, I am wondering how "safe" it is to use one's own homelab for this. If you have any experience regarding this topic, I would gladly appreciate some tips.

I understand that it's relatively cheap to get a VPS, and that is always an option, but it is always more fun to self-host on one's own bare metal! :)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You still need encryption between your CDN and your origin, ideally using a proper certificate.

It can be self-signed though, that's what I'm doing and it's partly to outsource the TLS maintenance. But the main reason I'm doing it is to get IP privacy. WHOIS domain privacy is fine, but to me it seems pretty sub-optimal for a personal site to be publicly associated with even a permanent IP address. A VPS is meant to be private, it's in the name. This is something that doesn't get talked about much. I don't see any way to achieve this without a CDN, unfortunately.

I guess it’s popular because people already use Github and don’t want to look for other services?

Yes, and the general confusion between Git and Github, and between public things and private things. It's everywhere today. Another example: saying "my Substack" as if blogging was just invented by this private company. So it's worse than just laziness IMO. It's a reflexive trusting of the private over the public.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it seems pretty sub-optimal for a personal site to be publicly associated with even a permanent IP address

What's the downside you see from having a static IP address?

I don't see any way to achieve this without a CDN, unfortunately.

I think you're looking for a reverse proxy. CDNs are essentially reverse proxies with edge caching (their main feature is that they cache files on servers that are closer to a user), but it sounds like you don't really care about the caching for your use case?

I don't know if any companies provide reverse proxies without a CDN though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What’s the downside you see from having a static IP address?

What's the downside to having one's phone number in the public directory? There's no security risk and yet plenty of people opt out. It's personally identifying information.

I don’t know if any companies provide reverse proxies without a CDN though.

Exactly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What's the downside to having one's phone number in the public directory?

The difference is that an IP of a VPS doesn't directly connect back to you. It's in the provider's name. Some providers let you change your IP address to a different one for a small fee.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yes yes, I know all that. The fact remains that a permanent IP associated with an individual is personally identifying information. Even the variety in browser requests counts as such according to the GDPR, and that is usually pooled with lots of other users. This is clearly a level above that. It's why, for example, I would not use the VPS for proxy web browsing: zero privacy.